wednesday
it's the fifteenth. the slice is due in september and i can count the weeks on my hands and i do not like the number — nine, maybe ten if Feira slips, and it won't. nine weeks to a playable vertical slice of Saltwater Almanac, and the Vertical Slice Checklist still has teeth: the ending beat isn't in, the tide audio is placeholder, and i haven't solved The Ending Problem — which isn't a bug, it's the whole philosophical spine, and i've been "solving" it for three months by writing notes about it.
but the game i'm less scared of. the game i know how to eat one checklist item at a time. the sea rises regardless and i've made my peace with building toward a loss you can't prevent — that's the one rule i won't soften — and there's something almost clean about a deadline where the point was never to win.
the phone call is the thing.
Mama gets here in three weeks. i've decided about Wend — really decided, see yesterday — and i've written every note around it a person could possibly write (Why I'm quitting, Quitting Wend, The call I haven't made). i have basically assembled a small library ABOUT making the call as an elaborate method of not making it, which is the most me sentence i have ever typed, and it belongs in Attention as love somehow: attention as love, but only when it's aimed at a coastline and never at the phone.
Priya's voice: it's a verb, Mara.
so. here are the tasks, and here is the one that has sat unchecked since june 28th — seventeen days of me copying it forward like a debt:
- call mama. today. after the tide-audio pass — not as a reward, as a deadline. the game gets nine weeks; this gets one afternoon. do the hard cheap thing before the hard expensive one.
- tide audio: replace the placeholder loop on the almanac screen
- one real pass at The Ending Problem — decide, don't note
- send the wayfinding synthesis (i'm embarrassed to admit how long this has ridden this list)
Halina finished hers. pencil, no readers, forty years, done. i have Unity and 2,847 people and a partner drawing me lighthouses and a mother who would so much rather hear it from me than read it off my face. The museum of intentions ends the day i pick up the phone.
so. after the audio pass. the sea rises regardless — call your mother anyway.